


She employs on Theresa the familiar jumpily anxious body language, the line deliveries that suggest someone who spends a lot of time in her head, subjugated by overthought. Though there are a handful of intense bursts, usually founded on keyed-up interactions Theresa has with her forever-disapproving father (Richard Kiley) and her on-screen love interests (a frenetic hustler type played by Richard Gere and a prissy welfare agent whom others see as “marriage material” portrayed by William Atherton), the performance also doesn’t feel out of step, necessarily, with the type of work Keaton is best known for.


Goodbar stars Diane Keaton, just six months fresh from her star-cementing role in Annie Hall, as Theresa she gives a captivating and emotionally eloquent performance. Then, if at all, the systems and attitudes that inspire people to speculate so fervently about Quinn’s doings above those of her murderer’s in the first place. The impulse was first to question and diagnose Quinn’s actions. Had Quinn not done, she wouldn’t have been violently killed. The subtext (though calling it subtext is probably generous) lurking in the coverage of Quinn and Rossner’s subsequent character studyification of her life was that an onrush of unmarried sex inexorably leads either to spiritual and/or physical death. As if it warranted conspiratorial whispering, she was often framed as having a “double life” - like it was unimaginable, and somehow morally contradictory, that a woman could both be a skilled and compassionate teacher and also someone who liked having unattached sex and wasn’t particularly interested in marriage. During the evenings, Quinn regularly spent time in singles bars and often took men home for one-night stands. Quinn’s story had been a media sensation before Rossner's book in large part because it could be easily configured into evidence for a conservative, moral panic-style talking point to push against then-vogue feminist ideologies around sexual freedom. She wouldn’t be so obligated to truth (the character in the book, though very similar to her inspiration, was named Theresa Dunn) she could more openly, which is also to say problematically, suggest that Quinn, in a lot of ways, submissively colluded in her violent demise. But after the magazine killed the article - the publication got cold feet because of potential legal trouble - Rossner turned toward dramatization, which in many ways liberated her.
